In a scene straight out of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," a group of congressmen have submitted a bill that would create a "Reasonable Profits Board" to regulate how much profit oil and gas companies are allowed to make.

The board would consist of three members, appointed by the President of the United States to three-year terms, and would be responsible for determining when oil companies were making excess profits. The law would levy a windfall tax ranging from 50% to 100% of those excess profits.

In case you're wondering, according to the bill, "The term ‘reasonable profit’ means the amount determined by the Reasonable Profits Board to be a reasonable profit on the sale."

What's interesting is who would not be allowed to sit on the board. No congressmen allowed. Nor any oil industry execs. "The members shall have no financial interests in any of the businesses for which reasonable profits are determined by the Board."

The confiscated windfall profits would fund tax credits for fuel-efficient cars and grants for mass transit.

Of course this is a terrible idea. A tax on a commodity supplier's profits only disincentives the capital investment required to find and produce more of the commodity. Tax oil unfairly and you'll end up with less oil, which would only push prices up higher. Furthermore, a tax on U.S. oil producers would only incentivize foreign producers like the OPEC nations to collude to raise the price of oil to "unreasonable" levels, knowing that their U.S. competitors would be taxed out of the marketplace, thus strengthening the position of their cartel-opoly.

Further, the bill shows no appreciation of the hard lessons learned in the 1970s that attempts by the government to control prices and profits only compounds the pain. In 1971 President Nixon imposed wage and price controls in an attempt to stop inflation. They were mostly dismantled in 1974 after inflation had rocketed into double digits. Then in 1980 President Carter and Congress enacted the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax. This turned out to be one of the most complicated taxes of all time, considering that every single person or company that had any interest in oil or gas wells was subject to it and had to fill out onerous forms laying out their tax liability. The law was on the books until 1988. So did it work?

In its eight years of existence, the WPT raised $79 billion in revenue, the CRS later reported. But since those payments were deductible against income, affected companies enjoyed a lower burden under the regular corporate income tax, effectively reducing the net yield to about $40 billion -- a far cry from early hopes.

Meanwhile, domestic oil production had fallen to its lowest level in 20 years. While demand had continued to rise, domestic producers had fallen behind in the search for new oil reserves. As a result, the United States had increased its reliance on foreign oil supplies. According to the American Petroleum Institute, the United States had derived about 32 percent of its energy from foreign sources in 1983. By 1986 that figure had climbed to 38 percent. Some analysts expected the trend to continue, although not everyone believed that taxes were driving the dynamic.

Ok, so it didn't raise much money, while it did gut the U.S. oil industry and increase U.S. dependence on foreign oil. That doesn't sound good.